Friday, July 11, 2014

BSNYC Friday Fun Quiz!

However, it’s also a lesson in the drawbacks of data visualization. In this case, the data is incredibly one-dimensional, and doesn’t necessarily accurately represent the best ways to get around the city. In addition to time, people take into consideration cost, what they need to carry, and what the weather conditions are.

Apparently, Manhattan and Brooklyn are cities unto themselves, and the rest of New York City does not exist--which you already know if you read the New York Times. Here's Manhattan by way of example:

So what does this even mean? You click on an address and it tells you how what the fastest way is to get...where exactly? Here's your answer:

To make this map, we gridded up the city at the block-group level, and then computed the time using each mode of transport from the centroid of the source block group to the centroid of the destination block group using the Google Maps API. For driving, we added a buffer time for parking and walking, and then we compared the four resulting times and colored the block-group based on the minimum.

Oh, okay, the centroid of the destination block group.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Look, forget about the map. Here's everything you need to know about the fastest way to get around in Manhattan:

--If your trip is less than 50 blocks it's probably faster to ride.
--If your trip is between 50 and 75 blocks it's probably a toss-up.
--If your trip is over 75 blocks it's probably faster to take the subway.
--Forget driving anywhere unless you know all the parking secrets like I do.
--If your trip is less than 10 block just walk, you lazy slob.
--Bicycle travel time for one (1) block of protected bike lane is equivalent to bicycle travel time for three (3) blocks without bike lanes, or one (1) crosstown block, so factor that in accordingly;
--If it's Hot As Balls just take the subway, provided your actual subway time is at least three (3) times longer than your projected platform wait time, because that's how long it will take for the subway's air conditioning to reconstitute the lump of molten plastic you've become while waiting at the station;
--If the subway car is empty, do not get in, because it means someone took a dump on the floor.

If you're planning to visit Manhattan as a tourist this summer I recommend printing and laminating the above and carrying it with you at all times.

Here's Brooklyn:

Brooklyn is way simpler than Manhattan. Basically, the red represents asshole drivers, and the yellow represents asshole drivers in Subarus, but if you've visited Brooklyn recently need "data visualization" to tell you that then you probably also need an interactive map to tell your ass from your elbow. Also, a bike is faster in almost all cases, because the subways are for going to Manhattan, and there's always car traffic because of all the aforementioned assholes.

And now, I'm pleased to present you with a quiz. As always, study the item, think, and click on your answer. If you're right then I'm like sooo happy for you, and if you're wrong you'll see "Breakaway."

I find usually that protected bike lanes take longer to travel in than the "reglar" street lanes due to the wheelchair pace you must maintain to safely get from centroid to centroid. Or the center of one hemorrhoid to the other. Due to courtesy (don't want to fling the Cit Bikerati, touristas, and 3 abreastistas to the curb) and the bike lanes consituting an officially mixed use space OMUS. Double parking, single parking, left and right turners, dog walkers, people walkers, salmonati, edge of the curbers, and the like.

Some guy on a Motobecane 29er flew past me up the Manhattan Bridge with too much ease. I was not fooled by his smaller than usual Lectric rear hub and ammo style battery box. I was able to keep up barely here and there. Then we went opposite directions on Houston.

Back in Ye Olden Dayes people were forced to think about stuff and characterize it with principles and theories and equations and whatnot. Nowadays, thanks to the luxury of computers that can handle volume, we have the option of skipping right to the data and trying to back-calculate. But if you don't do a good job selecting & parsing the data, and understanding the system and how it works, the results are usually crap. And if you DO take the trouble to do all that stuff, then you've already done most of the work of doing it the old way. So like, WHY?

These are people of the same generation as the med student that came up with a new way of calculating the area under a curve: he filled the area with smaller and smaller squares adding up their size as he went. Brilliant! He even got published in a journal for his "invention". Kids today. Sheesh.

Hey everybody, have a great weekend of possible bicycle cycling. May your holster remain full and any flares tossed in your direction be unlit.

If you can figure out most modern cars have front disk brakes and they do most of the stopping, you can figure this out.

If you every tried to hang a model airplane from you bedroom ceiling when you were a kid (or even after you were a kid) you remember trying to find the one spot to attach the string so the plane would hang level. That one spot is the centroid.

My dog warns I'm going to destroy the "cool factor," but I don't see how that's possible with moisture wicking material.

He explained there's a reason you don't see people wearing those caps with "Brooklyn" on the brim anymore.

I told him I still wear mine.

He responded "exactly."

Honestly, I don't follow half the stuff he says.

(Anyway, I bought an extra cap as an early birthday present for my twin brother 1500 miles away who just started riding again. I'm sure he'll appreciate it. The flames on the side will complement his tattoos. Well, most of them.)

The yacht on which 51-year-old Google executive Forrest Hayes was allegedly murdered last November is now for sale in an Alameda marina, and those who don't believe in ghosts can purchase it for a mere $345,000, as KRON4 reports.

In related news, Hayes's accused killer, Alix Tichelman, appeared in a Santa Cruz court this week to be arraigned on felony manslaughter and other charges. She's also been connected to another possible murder under similar, heroin-overdose circumstances, in Atlanta last September.

The yacht, named Escape, was moved from Santa Cruz to Alameda and a yacht broker is now trying to offload it on behalf of Hayes's wife and five kids. The circumstances surrounding the murder will be disclosed to any buyer. (See video tour below.)

Among the bells and whistles the yacht has to offer is a video surveillance system that Tichelman obviously did not know about, which Hayes had installed so that he could monitor a recent renovation of the boat from his cell phone. According to Santa Cruz police, the cameras caught Tichelman injecting Hayes with the fatal dose of heroin, seeing him clutch his heart and fall into unconsciousness, after which she stepped over his body to have a last sip of wine before cleaning up the scene and leaving.

Tichelman, 26, had apparently relocated from Atlanta last fall not long after the September 2013 death of her 53-year-old boyfriend Dean Riopelle, a well known Atlanta club owner and singer in a band called the Impotent Sea Snakes. The two had been dating for two and a half years, and lived together at the time.

As the Associated Press reports, Tichelman had been charged in a domestic violence incident just weeks before Riopelle's death, and the night of his death she called 911 claiming he had taken drugs and was unresponsive. His death was ruled accidental, from a combination of alcohol, oxycodone, and heroin, and Tichelman was never charged, however that case has now been reopened.

Tichelman appears to have been living in a two-story home in Folsom, California belonging to her father, and her Facebook page features a bunch of scantily clad and suggestive modeling shots of her. Her occupation is listed as both a self-employed model/makeup artist/writer, and "Baddest Bitch" at "Hustler" in Atlanta. She was allegedly working as a high-end call-girl when she made the acquaintance of Forrest Hayes. Investigators learned that she may have been trying to return to Georgia, or flee the country, late last month, prior to her arrest.

After years, I'm getting a fancy cap from Walz. And they offer sizes! But my Woo-Hoo speed is closer to 35. And I ride an old steel Trek. Is there a Woo-Hoo speed for retro-riders? We are allowed to Woo Hoo, right?

The left turning vehicle is always at fault! You cannot tell how fast the bike was going, and he was definitely slowing as he approached the car, but he may have been coming up the street at 20 mph, expecting to go through on the green, and then this car turns left, a little...

Of course this is a likely fictitious scenario I'm making this up, but so were PB and RQ.

the map of Manhattan is accurate. My bike commute from my place at 100th and West End to my job at 53th and 7th is around 15 minutes at a leisurely pace. The subway, with a 4-5 minute walk on each side is at least 25 minutes, at best. 20 minutes saved a day or about three days saved over the course of a year. I will be happy for that extra time in my twilight years. Also, NYC really only consists of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens. Brooklyn doesn't count anymore as it has become some weird east coast annex of Madison Wisconsin in the past few years. And Staten Island is Staten Island.

Sorry duder that hat is somewhat lame. where can I start... the color way is all wrong, the esoteric "46" has meaning to only us dorks who read this blog, and I'm frankly not sure that is something any of us should want to advertise. Also, the BSNYC logo should be replaced by the more handsome Rip torn mugshot. Other than that, it sucks. Start over.

The one time I commuted by bike from my neck of the hoods (near Wildcat ) it was due to the blackout of 2003. I was working in Soho. The trip took about an hour. Would've been faster, but I crashed into a distracted centroid.

RQWhen I was a kid I actually tried to ride down what was near a 45% grade, the embankment next to railroad tracks that were near our house. Got a few feet before I sailed over the bars and felt the bike land on top of me. Interesting experience. Don't need to do it again. (I wasn't hurt, but I was certainly enlightened.)

Commie. Well at least one of us saw it coming. And for once, I wasn't the one in the van with flashing lights! She got off lucky: The half Froome.

I figured Frooming counts as something akin to a half-babble. The physiotherapist was all sunshine and light yesterday, raving over my incredible recovery, my unbelievable range of motion. Lol! Range of motion is the very nature of connective tissue issues, but I'll take a speedy recovery any day. I read somewhere that a disproportionate number of athletes express this mutation.

I am taking a last minute trip across the Rockies next week, only this time I won't be doing it on two wheels.

Anon @ 3:13: The left-hand turning car appears to be coming out of a one-way street, so while possibly not having the right of way, he would not expect the bike to come straight at him. He would expect the bike to turn left or right, likely avoiding the collision.

No it's correct, I checked that shit with my nerdulator. Slope is rise over run. 1 ft rise in 10 feet of run (horizontally) is a 1/10 a.k.a. 10% grade, which actually would be white-knucklingly steep for truckers and probably you can't find a federal highway with a grade that steep. (I've seen 7% though.)

Ignoring friction, the acceleration due to gravity along the grade ends up being proportional to the percentage of the grade, due to vector mechanics. So for example on a 1% grade, "g" along the grade is 0.098 m/s2 or 0.32 ft/s2. Therefore you would reach woo-hoo-hoo speed (67.47 feet/sec) in approximately

210 seconds on a 1% grade30 seconds on a 7% grade5 seconds on a 45% grade2 seconds in freefall

Anonymous 2:51 is right. The cyclist in the video accident could not legally go straight, because the street he is continuing into is a one way flowing opposite his direction of travel. He should have turned either right or left, and had he done so would not have been hit. Doofus.

All very enjoyable abstruse this evening. When I factor in the coriolis effect and divide by the square of the hypotenuse, and taking into account how unusually close the moon is due to shave the earth, it all causes the magic 8-ball to say: Have Another Beer. Because Friday.

100? 101? I'm saying air drag can be thought of as friction, if one is not being nitpicky. But yes, displacing a pound or two of air takes some special effort. Go ahead and change "friction" to "friction and air drag" in your version.

Vancouver has the steepest grade city street in the world. I'm not sure what it's name is but it's on the South side of False Creek. I can ride UP it because I'm the Strongest Man In The World but in winter they have to block it off when it's icy or it snows because we also have the most stupid drivers in the world who think they can go down it in thier cars.

Actually, the component of gravity acting parallel to the hill is proportional to the sine of the angle the hill makes with the horizontal. The percent grade is the tangent of the angle. These are almost the same, since the angles are always pretty small.

I can actually out-Zinn Zinn when I want to. I just don't feel like it most of the time. Because how you store your wheels over the winter makes not a single damn bit of difference to anything.

Hey, Wildcat:History of New York question for you. Crosspalms got me thinking with his Dutch the other day.....Was Broadway once the Old Indian Road, the Indian Trail, Bloomingdale Road or Post Road? Just wondering.

That particular street has a bike lane on each side, one going up the wrong way of car traffic (it's my hometown). You know, one of those stupid forced salmoning bike lane. Which means it was completely legal for the cyclist to continue straight.

Just took a very pleasant ride, so far out in the boondocks that the majority of the many pickups you see were actually purchased for work of some kind. South from New Milford. Pa. on Rt 11, ten miles on mostly decent shoulders with no lights, very little traffic, almost no intersections, nearly level, no real scenery, just trees and some wetlands. No rolling coal, but one microcephalic in a cheezey muscle car volunteered to help perpetuate rural stereotypes by yelling FUCK out his window as he passed me. Just par for the course. A beautiful day. And New Milford, tiny as it is, has a little bike shop.

I consulted the Mr. Know-It-All Oracle and Fred terminal velocity is about 120 mph. That assumes Fred tumbles wildly out of control on the descent. If he was tucked in the aero position, he may achieve over 200 mph.

Since Fred weight is invariably somewhat north of 175 pounds (the mythical cutoff weight separating "Birds" from Freds) any calculation regarding TFV (Terminal Fred Velocity) must include a factor of *175 or *17.5 or *1.75 (depending on the equation being used) to be valid, IMHO.

Further to Friday's comments section( which was a collective Hoot), actual Fred Terminal Speed is inconsequential…what matters is that the Fred is Terminal, and will not come back to harass me and my fellow cyclists enjoying today's nice Rails To Trails™ riding experience.

About Me

While I love cycling and embrace it in all its forms, I'm also extremely critical. So I present to you my venting for your amusement and betterment. No offense meant to the critiqued. Always keep riding!